


Strawberries in November

by AceofHarts



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Bakery, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Fluff, M/M, minor illness mentioned, though it's not mostly IN the bakery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-11
Updated: 2014-10-11
Packaged: 2018-02-17 02:25:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2293517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AceofHarts/pseuds/AceofHarts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A rainy day brings a soaking wet delivery boy to Armin's front porch for shelter, at just the right time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Strawberries in November

            It was one of those cold Mondays in November when the rain was falling so hard and so fast that even the houses across the street were cloudy, distant silhouettes with no colour or depth. As far as Armin could see, he was currently inhabiting the only island of warmth and colour on the whole street. He had come back from class an hour ago to find the heat cranked up almost unbearably high. Next to the thermostat was a note from his roommate: ‘Don’t mess with it this time and don't mess around in the rain for once.’ There hadn’t actually been a _last_ time. The cold that had knocked Armin out that Saturday had been the result of a chilly, soaking-wet walk from a Halloween party, not some diabolical misuse of the thermostat. Still, the move was well-intentioned, so Armin had grimaced and left the temperature at a level liable to fry him.

            But now he’d worked through all his German language exercises, and when he looked out the window the world just looked too interesting for him to stay inside. He did have an excuse. Nobody had checked the mail for three weeks. Jean had told him a few days ago that he could expect at least one delivery in the near future, so really, if anyone should be checking the mailbox it should be him.

            Armin was not in such a rush to breathe clear, cold air that he abandoned all memory of how miserable he'd been two days earlier. Since he had settled on spending some time on the porch, however, the best he could do was arrange for his return. He went through the cupboards, but they were absolutely bare of any coffee—there wasn’t even any tea. The closest thing they had was hot chocolate mix. Normally he might have been embarrassed to be the first person to break into it, but he thought, to hell with it. There was nobody else around, today was one of the first really frigid days of the year, and he’d been spending all of his day so far either in lecture or swamped in translation notes. He’d already finished his midterms. Today, he could sneak a break.

            So, he flicked the kettle on and called himself prepared. From there it was a simple matter of opening the door, shutting his eyes when lashed with a cold wind, stepping forward, and smacking his face directly into something warm and damp and incredibly solid.

            Armin’s eyes popped open and revealed a set of shoulder blades, quite clearly delineated through a wet shirt.

            “Ah,” the other person said. “Sorry—”

            The speaker turned. Armin did not recognize his face at all, but that wasn’t the first thing that registered. He was too busy processing dripping, dark hair and wide, apologetic eyes. The latter forced him to concede an error: the interior of his rented student household was not, in fact, the sole scrap of colour in the vicinity. Accidental eye contact was normally the source of much embarrassment for Armin (especially since he’d been told by well-meaning friends that when he was thinking, his resting face could be disquieting and intense), but he was glad for it now.    

            Of course, much though he might approve of the young man’s facial structure, he wasn’t given to staring deeply into the eyes of strangers. He looked at the next most obvious target, which was held in his visitor’s hands. It was the sort of white cardboard box used for transporting pastry.

            “I was just waiting it out,” its holder said, tilting his head briefly towards the street to indicate the rain. “Here, I can go stand on one of your neighbours’ porches—”

            “I don’t mind,” Armin said. “You can stay.” He pulled a thick wad of envelopes from the mailbox. It wasn’t actually the first time that people had taken shelter on the porch; this was a city of many rainstorms, after all. Of course, this was the first time his uninvited guest hadn’t been some kid on their way to or from elementary school.

 _And you’d think someone about my age would know to be wearing a coat, or at least to have an umbrella_ , Armin thought. There was no real critical edge to the thought. He didn’t see how he had ground to stand on there when he’d just collided with a stranger on his own porch.

            Besides, a coat would not have helped the cardboard much. He’d been out on the porch for all of five seconds, and little shocks of cold rainwater were already jabbing through his sweater. Surely whatever was in that box would be better kept dry, especially given the logo for a local bakery stitched onto the young man’s shirt. Presumably this was a delivery. Nobody wanted a box of soggy baked goods.

            “Do you want to come inside until it eases up? The way the wind is, I don’t think you’re staying much dryer on the porch than you would on the sidewalk.”

            “Ahh, it's probably fine,” the delivery boy said. "It's not too bad out." 

            “It’ll be better for whatever you’re delivering.”

            “Oh, right. It’s probably all mushy already…” He bounced up and down on the spot, just twice, like he was considering jumping off of the porch and sprinting to complete his delivery. “Look, though, I don’t need to just walk into your house. Do you just have something I could put over this, until the storm eases up a bit?”

            “Yeah—I’ll be right out with it.”

            It took some scrambling around in dark reaches of the house he hadn’t investigated since the week after move-in, but Armin returned with a plastic tray and something he thought was probably a roasting pan. The tray went beneath the box, the pan went over top, and the baked goods were successfully saved from any further battering.

            “What’s your name?”, Armin’s guest asked once the delivery was secure. “I’m Eren,” he added quickly, when Armin looked a bit surprised to be asked.

            “Armin.”

            “Alright then—thanks, Armin. The delivery would’ve been really screwed if you hadn’t had a porch—and even still, with the bin thing. I was doing pretty well, up to just now… Ten deliveries today, and I managed to hit every dry patch until _this_. If I’d made the delivery before the rain hit I would’ve just kept going, but…”

            Armin supposed a talkative porch guest was preferable to a silent one. He'd come out here to get some air, and he had every intention of continuing to do that, so it might as well not be all stilted and strange. 

            “So you’re really into luck, then?”, he asked. 

            “No!”, Eren said, with what sounded like genuine offence. Armin might have worried about that if Eren hadn’t gone on. “I’m really into outrunning rainstorms if I need to. This one caught me.”

 _So not superstitious; just hilariously confident_ , Armin thought. He bit down a smile. There was no sense letting Eren think he was being made fun of.

            “Is that why you don’t have a coat?”

            “Yeah. I mean, that was not brilliant, either, but this delivery was so close I figured there wasn’t that much point.”

            “What are you delivering, anyway?”

            “It’s a cake,” Eren said, hefting the box a little higher as if to show it off. “For someone’s birthday, probably. I didn’t check.”

            “Ahh, I didn’t know any of my neighbours had a birthday around now…”

            “It’s mostly students in this neighbourhood, right?” Armin nodded. He thought the amount of streamers, beer cans, and pumpkin detritus from the recent Halloween was a bit of a giveaway. Most of the neighbourhood had been too hung-over from the weekend to consider cleaning up just yet. “We get a lot of orders here. Usually they call in like, ‘I need the cheapest birthday cake you’ve got.’ We’re closer than the grocery store, and we deliver, so I guess it makes sense.”

            “Is that what you do, then? Cakes?”

            Eren straightened up immediately.

            “Yeah! We're sort of famous for them. Well, not _me_ , since I mostly get stuck on the easier things, but I’m working my way up the food chain, when I’m not on delivery. It’s mostly cookies, still, for me. But yeah, we do cakes, and a ton of other things. Pies, tarts, cookies, cupcakes, brownies, bread—pretty much anything bakeable, we can make, especially if you’re willing to custom order. Why? Is there something you like? You can call them up, I’m sure they’ll be able to make whatever it is—”

            Armin had really only been observing social niceties. He passed the bakery every day on his way to and from the bus stop, and for all the wafting smell of bread, he’d never forsaken an early arrival at class or a shorter trip home. It was just one storefront of a dozen in the nearby plaza. But Eren looked so earnest and proud and generally sold on the whole idea that Armin gave it some thought. It had been a long time since he’d had proper baked goods, or even anything reasonably sweet. He never devoted enough time to kitchen matters to make anything like that for himself—there always seemed to be something more important going on—and his roommates weren’t given to displays of culinary affection. When Armin had been recovering from his cold, he’d overheard his housemates all gathered in the kitchen conferring in hushed tones about what Armin took in his coffee. They’d wound up depositing a canister-like mug of chamomile tea on his nightstand instead.

            “I guess, maybe, strawberry cupcakes or something like that…" Armin said. "Is that even a category of cupcakes? I’m a bit rusty, sorry…”

            “Yeah it is! Here, do you have some paper or something? I can write down the number for you—”

            “I don’t have any on me. Um.” Armin held his hand out. “If you have a pen…”

            Eren pulled one from his pocket and handed it over, and then he and Armin both stared at it for a moment.

            “You meant I should write it,” Eren said as realization dawned.

            “…Yeah.”

            “Alright, here—” He swiped the pen back and, with some effort, scrawled out a string of numbers across the soft, squishy skin of Armin’s palm. “My handwriting’s sort of a mess. Can you make that out?”

            “It’s…three eight two five? Or five eight two five?”

            “Three,” Eren said.

            “Okay. I’ll…I’ll be sure to give them a call, sometime.”

            Today would have been an appropriate time to do it, but he suspected the bakery was just about closed. He folded his fingers over the number and then looked out at the rain, which if anything was falling harder than before. His hair was starting to cling to his cheeks, and his socked feet were starting to go numb, and he was _really_ looking forward to—to—

            “Oh—right, I had the kettle on, I—” He started to turn towards the door before the guilt swamped him. “Do you want something to drink?” Realizing when Eren’s eyebrows shot up that this sounded like he was proposing they get drunk, he added, “You’re out in this without a jacket, so just something hot—just—hot chocolate, actually, since it’s all I have right now.”

            It took him a moment to process Eren’s expression. Armin was not normally the one putting smiles on people’s faces. He had not told a successful joke in his life, and uplifting statements just really were not his strength.

            “Are you serious? That’s okay?”, Eren asked. “I haven’t had that since I was a kid.”

            Armin’s face burned.

            “I know it’s not quite the season for it yet, but if you want it—”

            “Hell yeah! Thanks.”

            Armin’s exit from the scene was eased by the fact that at that moment, his cellphone started to ring. He answered it as he stepped inside.

            “Hel—” He was interrupted by a sneeze from his caller, followed by heartfelt (if somewhat indecipherable) cursing. Armin shut the door behind him and raced for the kettle, which was spitting steam and hot water. “Jean?”

            “Yeahh,” came the response. “Ugh.” Armin was sure he heard Jean wipe his nose on his sleeve. “Uhh, bad news…”

            “You guys are too sick to come over.”

            “I really resent sometimes that you’re smart.”

            “This wasn’t exactly a hard case to crack.”

            “I guess.” Jean gave a mighty sniff. “Sorry about this. It took all of us just… _right_ out. No class or anything.”

            “It’s really okay,” Armin said. He held the phone against his ear with his shoulder as he pulled out two mugs from the cupboard. “I can see you any time. I already _do_.”

            “S’not okay. And any time’s not _this_ time. You can be all unsentimental and weird if you want, but we’re here to do that for you. Only we’re not. There. To do that. We’re all the worst. The wheezing, phlegmy worst. We’ll throw you some kind of huge party in a—in a—” He sneezed. “When we can. We can all have a great round of pin-the-tail-on-the-terrible-friend.”

            “That doesn’t sound like that much fun, though…? And I don’t actually have any terrible friends, so.”

            “You’re awful.”

            “Have any of you eaten anything at all today?”

            “Uhhh, Sasha busted out the crackers a while ago…”

            “I’ll be by in a bit with—soup, or something.”

            “Armin _no_ —”

            “Jean.” He grumbled incoherently but didn’t muster a full argument. He knew he would lose it anyway. It wasn’t easy to out-logic Armin, especially when you were sick. “I’ll leave it on your doorstep if you don’t want me coming in.”

            “Fine. But I’m going to complain at you for being all decent and stuff.”

            “I can live with that. I’ll be there around seven.”

            When Armin emerged again onto the porch with two mugs in hand, Eren was perched on the arm of one of the porch chairs. He was sitting there, soaking wet and shivering slightly (and there were goosebumps on his arms and Armin should _not_ have been looking this closely at his arms, but they were so well-defined it was a bit overwhelming). Despite all that, Eren gave the most wholehearted, dazzling grin imaginable when handed a cup of hot chocolate.

            Once he’d passed the mug over, Armin settled on the arm of another chair. He had been a bit puzzled and vaguely amused by Eren’s presence here before, but he was downright grateful for it now. He didn’t resent Jean and the others—if they'd turned up sick on his doorstep he would have chased them all home and made sure they got some rest—but with his roommates out, there was nothing but a dry pile of textbooks waiting for him inside. He’d sacrifice comfort if it meant having such personable company.

            Eren had no shortage of things to say—glowing words about the bakery he worked for, and how they were easily the best in the city; even more glowing words about his sister, who had ascended quickly among the bakery’s ranks; complaints about how one of his fellow delivery boys had crashed the company car. This was followed by a hasty retraction.

            “It’s not like I mind walking,” he said. “Most of our calls are from right around here anyway, so it’s fine, most days. It’s just that I don’t want to wind up tossing a pie into a snowdrift, you know? It’s better for the merchandise if it’s delivered in a car.”

            “You’re… _really_ dedicated, you know,” Armin said. He’d stopped himself from saying ‘unusually,’ in part because it would have been rude and in part because he was infamous in his social circle for being terrifyingly single-minded when there was something to get done. There was no sense painting Eren as some alien creature for the very characteristic they seemed to share.

            Honestly, he’d never thought of it as a positive trait before now.

            Eren frowned a bit and scratched at the back of his neck.

            “I figure I’ve got to be. They make really great stuff, and they’ve got a solid reputation. I don’t want to be the one screwing it up for them.”

            “Hmm…”

            “Well what about you?”

            “I…what?”

            “You’ve only really been responding to what I’ve been saying. I can’t figure you’re that into bakery stuff that there’s nothing else you want to talk about. You’re studying languages, right?”

            “What makes you think that?”

            Eren held up one of his hands.

            “Is that German you’ve got written on your arm? And French?” Before Armin could confirm, Eren said, “Were you cheating on your midterms?”

            “No!”, Armin said, more loudly than he’d meant. “I just don’t always have paper with me when I come across a phrase I should know. And yes, just French and German this year.”

            Eren nearly fell off of his armrest.

            “So then you’re learning others!”

            “Soon, hopefully—I was thinking Portuguese, and maybe one of the Chinese languages, but I’m not sure yet.”

            “Whoa. You want to travel, or…?” Armin nodded. “Anywhere specific?”

            “Anywhere I can, really.”

            “Wow. I’ve barely ever even gone out of town… Are you fluent? Do you know how to—introduce yourself, and all that? I should know this, my grandparents speak German all the time. Ich bin...uh...”

            " _Ich heisse Eren_ ," Armin said, and both of them blinked. Armin looked away first. "I mean, obviously _you're_ Eren, but that's how it goes."

            "Huh. Ich heisse... _he_ _isse_..."

            He sat there with his brow furrowed, letting his mouth get used to the shape of the words in much the same way Armin had, months ago now. It was a strange thing to watch from the outside, precisely because it was so familiar. 

            Armin looked down into his cup. He’d meant to drink it slowly so that he’d have something hot to hold onto for longer, but the mug between his hands was empty. When he looked up again, he found the houses across the street to be perfectly visible. The rain had slowed nearly to a halt; it plinked down every now and then on the porch railing, gently and straight down. The downpour had stopped suddenly—so quickly that the silence was jarring.

            Though for a moment there Eren had looked like the only thing in the world was a basic German sentence, he noticed it too. He stood and rested his mug on the chair.

            “I’ve got to get moving,” he said. He pulled the cake from its makeshift shelter. “If it starts pouring again on the way back I might hide out here again for a while.”

            Again Armin stopped a smile before it could surface. He wondered whether Eren thought he didn’t remember his earlier statement about his willingness to walk in the rain. He placed his mug and Eren’s on the tray, fitted the roasting pan over it, and lifted the whole device up.

            “Alright,” he said. “You can knock, to let me know you’re out here. Oh, and you can probably expect another delivery to this neighbourhood within the next week or so.”

            “I’ll keep an eye out,” Eren said. “If I let one of the others get it and they all find out there’s a house on Rose Street where they can get hot chocolate, all our delivery people are going to slow down by half an hour.”

            “Instead of just one of them slowing down by half an hour,” Armin said, before he could stop himself.

            “I had to! It’s my job to get things where they’re going safely.”

            “Well I’m…glad you take it so seriously. Actually.”

            The door shut behind Armin before Eren even started down the steps.

            He was at the end of the sidewalk before it occurred to him to check the address again. He’d never had a delay like that mid-delivery before, and it would be a disgrace to hand over a pre-paid delivery to some cake-coveting non-customer.

_Five hundred and thirty-nine, Rose Street South. Right._

            Normally he would have marched right onward the instant he’d read it—but his feet remained fixed to the flooded sidewalk. That five was a little wobbly around the top half. If he squinted, it might have been a three. 

            His gaze strayed back up to the porch he’d just left, and to the cracked plastic numbers nailed to the front wall. _339_.

            Eren looked at the box in the crook of his elbow for a long moment as he weighed his options. He could call the bakery and confirm the order, but it would be just as easy and much less embarrassing to pull the tape off the box and open it up. Most people put names on cakes, if they were for other people.

            _Happy Birthday Armin_ , the cake said.

            “Oh,” Eren said.

            He was back on the porch before he’d quite thought it through, and it was only when the door swung open and Armin was before him again that Eren realized he’d neglected to close the box.

            “Good news,” he said with great gravity, holding the cake out to its proper recipient. “It’s strawberry shortcake. That’s one of our best. Your friends didn’t go cheap.”

            Armin stared at his name, which spelled immaculately in red gel on the flat surface at the centre of the cake. A quick calculation followed.

            “That’s too big for me and my roommates,” he said. “We’ll be eating it all week.” He lifted his gaze to meet Eren’s. “Are you still working?”

            “This’s the last delivery of the day,” Eren said. He hadn’t quite realized it consciously yet, but the little jump in his expression told Armin that he knew where this was going on some base level. “I’m on my way home now.”

            “Then, do you want some cake?”

            The cake did turn out to be slightly damp, and that turned out to be entirely irrelevant.

 

            “Eren, get out in front,” Mikasa called. Eren scowled as he studied the icing recipe before him, and forgot that he'd been trying to rub a smear of flour off of his cheek.

            “I’m kind of busy, here, Mikasa!” It was the first time he’d been assigned to work on even a basic cake, and he didn’t want to make a mess of it. There had been disasters in the past with new recruits, and even with seasoned bakers—salty wedding cakes, liquid pies, bitter cookies. Eren did not want his legacy in this bakery to be ‘that guy who substituted flour for sugar in the icing.’ Besides, it was nine in the morning on a Wednesday. This wasn’t exactly prime shopping time, so Mikasa probably didn’t need any help at the counter.

            And he’d never admit it aloud, but his pride couldn’t take being reassigned from this task to a delivery. He liked to think he wouldn’t sulk about it—he’d learned to take whatever assignments he was given and do his best with them—but it was going to sting. If that was what he was being summoned for, he felt it should wait until he’d finished with this cake.

            Mikasa leaned back against the door that led to the shop front.  

            “I promise you, you will not regret it,” she said. “We have someone asking about the cookies. You’re the expert.”

            Eren looked at the bag of sugar on the counter with a level of longing and regret rarely shown to a raw ingredient. Then he turned on his heel and stalked out to the front of the shop.

            He stalled for half a step on the threshold. There was a blond young man in the shop, leaning down to peer into one of the display cases against the storefront window.

            “Hey,” Eren said, even though it was rude, because all he really needed was for this person to turn around. He did, blinking, and when he saw Eren and Eren saw him they both opened their mouths at the same time and said something like ‘Ahh!’ with great conviction.

            Armin recovered first. Eren’s brain was still working through the following information: Mikasa had sent Eren to deal with this; Eren had apparently described the language-learning cake-saving ink-stained young man sufficiently that Mikasa had recognized him on sight. Perhaps most importantly, Armin was here, and he was specifically seeking the items he knew Eren was most likely to have made.   

            Eren had not been this flattered since he’d been hired at the bakery in the first place.

            “I’m meeting some of my friends,” Armin said, “because they missed my birthday, but I’m sort of minus a cake, since we ate part of it, so—also, the cake was very good, which…you know, since you had some, but…my roommates ate most of the rest of it. Cookies are more portable, anyway. I’m not sure what ones to go with, though.”

            Eren was not so flustered that his expertise failed him. His knowledge of the bakery's wares had been drilled into his head by a lot of time setting out displays, a lot of time eating the leftovers, and a lot of conviction that he would never, ever try to sell a customer something he knew nothing about. 

            “You like chocolate, right?” Armin nodded. Eren’s arm lifted seemingly of its own accord and pointed to the shelf beside Armin. “Those are the best ones just there. By far. And they’re softer than the others, so they’re not as likely to crumble on you while you move. How many do you want?”

            “A dozen,” Armin said. Eren retrieved them for him and put them in one of those flimsy white cardboard boxes. Fortunately for the cookies, the sun was shining today.

            “Isn’t that thirteen?”, Armin said as he watched.

            “It’s a baker’s dozen,” Eren said. He paused, and then he slid a fourteenth cookie into the box as covertly as he could. “I can ring myself through for that one…”

            “Um, no, it’s alright. If this is you paying me back for the cake—”

            “It’s not that.” He set the box on the counter, taped it closed, and moved around to get behind the cash register. Once Armin had paid for his dozen cookies and Eren had paid for his one, Eren picked up the box again, presented it to Armin, and said, “Happy belated birthday.”

            The fact that he’d managed not to say this at all during his second visit to the porch had been making him cringe for days.

            “Thanks,” Armin said, with a genuineness he hadn’t expected. He’d stopped caring about his birthdays when he’d been all of nine years old. He’d hardly given them any thought until he’d been faced with the prospect of sitting through this most recent one with practically no human contact. “I think I’ll be around here a lot, if the cookies are halfway as good as the cake.”

            “Ahhhh—yeah, we’ve got tons of good stuff, so even if you don’t like the cookies—Mikasa’s got almost a monopoly on the puff pastries and they’re pretty incredible, and then there’re the pies and the—” He resisted the impulse to give a full rundown of the menu. “And I mean, if you put in an order for, say, strawberry cupcakes, on a day when we’re busy, I might even get assigned to make them now that I’m moving up from cookies. You’d actually really be helping me out.”

            He could not have really presented his case more convincingly.

 

            It did not surprise Armin when, three weeks later, the delivery boy who arrived on his porch was Eren. It did not surprise him to find that Eren was out of uniform (“Last delivery of the day,” he said with a somewhat jittery grin). It did not even surprise Armin that, when he opened the box handed to him, he found six cupcakes each with two slices of strawberry on top cunningly arranged into the shape of a heart.

            When he looked up again from his order and found that Eren was looking at him with unadulterated, unabashed hope on his face, Armin was reasonably sure he had his answer.

            All that he needed to do, then, was vocalize the question.

            “Do you want to go out sometime, maybe?”

            Eren’s teeth clicked back together. He hadn’t even made it as far as opening his mouth to ask much the same thing. He’d thought he’d been quite clever with the strawberries. He’d expected Armin to maybe ask him whether that was always a feature, or to at least spend more time looking at them so Eren could have a moment to gather his wits.

            But Armin had had enough hesitating over the past several weeks. He’d stopped into the bakery for bread every now and then, and Eren had always been more than enthusiastic to receive him and to recommend whatever else was best that day. It had still been difficult for Armin to say whether or not there was any romantic interest, or whether Eren was just a very passionate and effective dessert salesman. Given that he had just been handed what appeared to be half a dozen sugary love notes, Armin felt he could now be reasonably sure of his footing.

            “I—yeah. This weekend?”, Eren said.

            “If that works for you.”

            They exchanged phone numbers, then. When Armin turned towards the door he could not help but notice that there were no footsteps plodding off the porch. He paused and looked around at Eren, who was standing just where he’d been, with his hands in his coat pockets and a patient look on his face.

            “Are you—did I not pay you?”

            “You did. I'm—” The embarrassment stopped him short, but his eyes betrayed him; his gaze dropped to the box of cupcakes.

            “You want one?”

            Eren nodded seriously, more because frowning was a method of pre-empting some more embarrassing sequence of expressions than because he observed cupcakes with some sort of grim reverence.

            “I didn’t make enough to be able to try any.” Then there was the fact that he’d actually made this delivery after-hours, specifically so that he’d have time to stay out on the porch and get a proper conversation going. All he really knew about Armin thus far was that he was polite and generous (and hospitable and kind and beautiful and had good taste in baked goods and an exploratory bent)—but Eren was not so easily swayed by all this that he didn’t want to actually get to know the guy. Properly. At great length, if need be. He had been willing to sit out on this porch all through what was looking more and more likely to be a blizzard, if that was what it took. Foggy infatuation was enough for Eren when it came to most of his crushes, but Armin seemed like someone he could actually genuinely be interested in. 

            “Well,” Armin said, to buy himself a moment. A moment was all he needed. “It’s a lot colder today. Do you want to come in?”

            After all, if his housemates could turn up for breakfast with strangers from nightclubs, it was only fair he should get to sit around in the kitchen with a baker and a box of cupcakes. At least there might have been some professional excuse in there somewhere, if he felt like looking for it.

            Eren had no interest whatsoever in excuses, professional or otherwise.

            “Yeah,” he said, “absolutely. Or _ja_ , if you want.”

            Armin didn’t even try to squash down the smile this time.

**Author's Note:**

> It was raining here and people all along my street were just going up on strangers' porches and it was all very sociable and strange, so I thought I'd make a fic out of it.  
> Honestly, this is basically a present for myself because I need some fluff while I work on other things ;;


End file.
